While the romantic poets' idea of memories being akin to spirits may have poetic merit, the scientists' perspective is that memories are concrete, physical entities that can be visualized within various regions of the brain.

Cortical malformations are a major cause of epileptic seizures and are a hallmark feature of many neurodevelopmental disorders. Expanding upon its recently-published model of cortical malformations, a Yale team lead by neuroscientist ...

Proteins that bind DNA or RNA are usually put in different categories, but researchers at Umeå University in Sweden and Inserm in France recently showed how the p53 protein has the capacity to bind both and how this controls ...

Malaria parasites cause hundreds of millions of infections, and kills hundreds of thousands of people annually, mostly in Africa. And in recent years the most dangerous malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, has become ...

Salk Institute scientists showed how an FDA-approved drug boosts the health of brain cells by limiting their energy use. Like removing unnecessary lighting from a financially strapped household to save on electricity bills, ...

Assistant Professor Joe Abisambra, researcher at the University of Kentucky Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, has demonstrated for the first time that tau impairs protein synthesis—a key component in memory loss.

Advanced prostate cancer is a disease notoriously resistant to treatment. New research by scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of California, San Francisco sheds light on a new mode of drug ...

Protein biosynthesis

Protein synthesis is the process in which cells build proteins. The term is sometimes used to refer only to protein translation but more often it refers to a multi-step process, beginning with amino acid synthesis and transcription of nuclear DNA into messenger RNA which is then used as input to translation.

The cistron DNA is transcribed into a variety of RNA intermediates. The last version is used as a template in synthesis of a polypeptide chain. Proteins can often be synthesized directly from genes by translating mRNA. When a protein is harmful and needs to be available on short notice or in large quantities, a protein precursor is produced. A proprotein is an inactive protein containing one or more inhibitory peptides that can be activated when the inhibitory sequence is removed by proteolysis during posttranslational modification. A preprotein is a form that contains a signal sequence (an N-terminal signal peptide) that specifies its insertion into or through membranes; i.e., targets them for secretion. The signal peptide is cleaved off in the endoplasmic reticulum.. Preproproteins have both sequences (inhibitory and signal) still present.

For synthesis of protein, a succession of tRNA molecules charged with appropriate amino acids have to be brought together with an mRNA molecule and matched up by base-pairing through their anti-codons with each of its successive codons. The amino acids then have to be linked together to extend the growing protein chain, and the tRNAs, relieved of their burdens, have to be released. This whole complex of processes is carried out by a giant multimolecular machine, the ribosome, formed of two main chains of RNA, called ribosomal RNA (rRNA), and more than 50 different proteins. This molecular juggernaut latches onto the end of an mRNA molecule and then trundles along it, capturing loaded tRNA molecules and stitching together the amino acids they carry to form a new protein chain.

Protein biosynthesis, although very similar, is different for prokaryotes and eukaryotes.